Friday, 10 June 2016.

Historically EH&S management principally occurred at the site level. That’s a natural but limiting approach to EH&S for firms that have had programmes running for 10+ years. Another way to think about it is to bring in a clear view of the underlying products or assets. Verdantix covers the relationship between products and EH&S as part of its product stewardship research. Combining EH&S and assets into a single view leads executives to recognise the relationship between EH&S and production – in other words linking a source of risks and their combined impact on operational performance.

Verdantix has therefore started covering Industrial Operations Risk Management (IORM) in its research to understand how frameworks and technologies are developing to embrace this new trend.

While as a concept IORM is in early stages, firms have embraced its components and the technologies are available with software vendors investing in products to deliver IORM. Witness major IT system integrator Accenture having developed a platform for IORM referred to as Asset and Operations Services and global EH&S software vendors building functionalities such as full lifecycle incident management, near miss workflow, CA/PA, MOC workflow, risk identification, risk register, and risk analytics.

What’s the catch? There is a lack of overarching systems that combines all the functionality required for IORM. From a technology perspective IORM requires an aggregation of functionality from diverse existing software systems including integrated safe system of work (ISSOW), enterprise asset management (EAM), environment, health and safety (EH&S), and Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC).